How rangy do you like your guitar jams? Well, if you’re not into shutting your mouth and letting the fretboard do the talking, you might not be that into digging through Real Emotional Trash. Yup, we’ve already visited Baltimore, presented a tracklist, and hinted at the expansiveness of Malkmus’s wild ride, but then we were only hinting. On his fourth solo album, SM ups the knot-per-inch ratio quite a bit from Face The Truth, which has its share of tunes at the 3 minute and less mark. Real Emotional sports a couple — “Gardenia” and “We Can’t Help You” — but otherwise we’re more usually in the five minutes and up realm. Then comes the 10-minute title track.
The odd part of all the excess it that it’s a more natural sounding, stylistically laid back album than its predecessor. You won’t hear such upfront bleeps and whirls, as on “Pencil Rot” or “I’ve Hardly Been,” etc. It’s fucking discursive, yeah, but its also crystalline and narrative. Daddy’s on the run. And, at times the wank maketh sense: It’s this vast landscape, the open highway, the pauses between sentences. We were talking about great lyrics recently when evaluating the Mountain Goats’ Heretic Pride. Of course, Malkmus is quite the wordsmith as well, though his narratives tend to spin in on themselves like his song structures. So you catch gleams and amazing lines, but the start to finish won’t be as clear as Darnielle’s more short story-style tunes. It’s almost like sayings from an absurdist Poor Richard’s Almanac: “It’s warm for a witch trial, / don’t you agree?,” “dragonfly wants a piece of pie, but he is so strung out,” “who was it that said, ‘the world is my oyster’? / I feel like a nympho stuck in a cloister,” “Wicked wicked Wanda / I’d rather date Rwanda,” etc. Despite its silliness, “Hopscotch Willie,” a “classic example of a fall guy,” offers a classic example of the way Malkmus has some of the most interesting line-delivery sense since Lou Reed.
The straight-up great tracks are “Cold Son” (ah, those m/f harmonies), the pop-bopping “Gardenia” and its run-on rhymes (“well, you are a gardenia pressed in the campaign journal in the rucksack of an Afrikaner, etc”.) and “We Can’t Help You,” with its instrumental minimalism and lyrical largess. Of course, it’s not Malkmus going it alone. It’s his interplay with the Jicks — Janet Weiss handling drums (wonderfully, per usual) with Joanna Bolme on bass and Mike Clark on another guitar and keyboards — that allows the band to expand and contract. As on another standout, the opener “Dragonfly,” which moves from ominous psych fuzz to chirpy upbeat and then tiptoes (and roars) back. Another winner is that aforementioned epic (10:09) title track works itself into an emotional tizzy and sense of frolicsome ’60s psychedelic relief (road trippin’, pantin’ like a pit bull).
It’s fitting that one of the first lines in the album involves “my digressions.” We’re sorta on the fence with this one: When you sit down and closely study Real Emotional there’s some of that aforementioned amazing stuff going on, but it doesn’t entirely work as a straight-up listening experience. We know Malkmus is an uncompromising dude, but can’t help but wonder if he’ll ever cut out the chicanery and go for a straight-up weirdo pop album. In fact, some of our favorite material shows up in the second half, so it feels like he’s leading towards something smaller. Maybe. His (and Pavement’s and that early Silver Jews’) shit’s always been weird. That’s why it offers so much to love. Might be nice, though, if he was just a little more concise with his post-slacker tomfoolery.
Real Emotional Trash is out 3/4 on Matador.
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Hearing this album makes me wish for Pavement even more.
I almost can’t listen to Malkmus’s solo work anymore.
Took me a while, but it’s easily my favorite Jicks album. It’s got a bit of a “Brighten the Corners” feel to it, which on the whole isn’t a favorite album of mine, but this time I mean it in a totally good way.
The completely kickass drumming really does tie it together, too.
i love this album. each song has its own face, and they’re all pretty. best jicks record, i believe. but it’s true you folks underrate his post-pavement catalogue.
A lot of his solo songs work better live, IMO.
tk, i agree with your solo songs live sentiment, and i think that this album, especially the perfect title-track, go for a hotter live sound.
Listen listen listen, it’s a great listening experience.
love this guy
in other news, is chan’s mole painted on now or did it grow since the last time we saw her:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/later/shows/series31/episode01/photos/gallery1/03.shtml#image
enough with shitty records from washed-up members of a shitty 90s band who gained as much hype as that other shit band crudpire weekend… when is some new Clipse material coming in? what happened to The Kinks reunion? does anyone here know who “tha realest” Mac Dre is? does anyone here besides me still talk about REAL music at all?
in other news, anyone else besides me realize the fact that chan marshall is as much an untalented slut as britney spears or paris hilton?
Will The Kinks reunion feature the Davies brothers knife-fighting on stage?
this is malkmus’ best album. the reviewer’s obsession with song length is petty.
this album is tops. a blast all the way through. mayhaps changing tides and yet another superb release will make it cool to like malkmus again. or you could salivate over the new clipse album. though you might have a harder time scoring coke from malkmus.
This is by far his best work to date.
I have to say this is his strongest record. i love all his solo shit but man, this one is so killer. The 10 minute title track is so awesome. Its like “Pig Lib: Part Deux: Redux”
I fully agree with Jackson re: Pig Lib: Part Deux: Redux, it makes total sense for this album to carry the Jicks moniker whereas Face The Truth was billed as a more straightforward solo endeavor. This is a band record, a fully realized collision of ideas and sounds that picks up directly where Pig Lib leaves off.
I do, however, still carry a torch for Pig Lib as my favorite SM record (and that includes all Pavement albums too).
We did a piece on the 10-minute title track last week actually: http://earfarm.blogspot.com/2008/01/8_24.html
great stuff – the natural follow up to the Jick’s work on Pig Lib.
“It’s fucking discursive, yeah, but its also crystalline and narrative. Daddy’s on the run. And, at times the wank maketh sense”
WHAT THE FUCK!? THIS IS HARDLY READABLE. UGH…
and song length means nothing, in terms of how “epic” something is. Death Cab put out a 10 or 12 minute song one time and it was the most boring thing they have ever done (to date). We get the point. The songs are longer on this record than on the last one. Is that it?
I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m weird with SM, Brighten is my favorite Pavement record and Face The Truth was my top album of 05, the more “jammy” he gets the more I like it. I anticipate enjoying this one immensely.
well, you’re obviously a pavement nub. brighten doesnt hold a fucking candle to their first three, or watery, domestic.
WOW! this stupid review fails to mention that this album isn t just “jammy”.. cos i also think it is way “groovy… ..”out of reaches” is my personal fave of the cut,, the hammond groove mid=way through and the sincerity of his vocals.. malkmus never fails, he may never come out with a 10 outta ten, but hey,, anyone with an album title so perfect for the times,,.hmmmmmm, NONO No… this shit ain’t no trash…
agreed with ugh. this crap is NOT epic AT ALL nor is it even considered good. also, why listen to this piece of shit pathetic excuse for “music” when you can listen to better music such as Acid Mothers Temple, CLIPSE, Calvin Harris, or Trash Talk?
Face plant, stumble ahead. Victim of your rival pretensions…
yeah, this is a rocking album. i cannot wait to see this live with John Vanderslice in a month. i can see where newcomers to the malkmus catalog might be turned off, but i think any fan of pavement or the sm solo stuff will be pretty damn pleased.
I really enjoy this album. The songs do meander quite a bit, but they always do so constructively. I love the transition from heavy metal crescendo to southern rock sincerity halfway through the title track:
“I traipsed over the Mexican border in a cheap caravan, man”
What a great fucking line. I love that word. Traipse.
Anyways, I think this review sells the album short. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best thing he’s done since Pavement, maybe even better.
I agree with a lot of what you said in the review here. I had a hard time digging it when listening from begining to end as a whole and I definitely tended to warm up to it on the second half when doing this. It was when I started listening to the songs when they would come up in random mode on the Shuffle that I really started to like the album. Perhaps it’s one of those “growers” that everyone seems to be talking about these days, but I like this one a lot more than Face the Truth and have been enjoying these songs a great deal when they are taken away from their surroundings.
I think Stephen Malkmus albums are rocky territory for hipster reviewers because while he is a godfather of the indie rock scene, a lot of his new stuff is (god forbid) kind of jammy and unselfconsciously weird.
But if you like face the truth then you will probably like this album as much or more. Personally I like that he fleshes out his albums with some guitar breakdowns and though they aren’t concise, they definitely aren’t just noodling around or searching.